


turning pain into red birds

by seinmit



Series: Writing the Rainbow [8]
Category: Us (Movie 2019)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Dream Sex, F/F, Knifeplay, Masturbation, Painplay, Penetration with Scissors, Rape/Non-con Elements, Scissorplay?, Underage Masturbation, Underage Rape/Non-con, background Adelaide/Gabe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-23 09:02:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23009008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/pseuds/seinmit
Summary: Addy doesn't masturbate anymore.
Relationships: Adelaide Wilson/Red (Us Movie 2019)
Series: Writing the Rainbow [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1567993
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16
Collections: Writing Rainbow Red





	turning pain into red birds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiriamKenneath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiriamKenneath/gifts).



> Title from [Ways of Rebelling](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58509/ways-of-rebelling) by Nathalie Handal

Gabe is the best boyfriend she's ever had. Addy thinks that, but more to the point, everyone she talks to about it agrees.

There's a bunch of different reasons, but the one that surprises her the most is that when he found out she doesn't masturbate, he was concerned.

"Shouldn't he be like, threatened?" Addy asked one friend.

"Only assholes would be threatened," she replied with confidence.  
  
Addy chewed her lip and hummed and changed the subject. It's the consensus from her friends, though, and Gabe keeps bringing it up.

There's no explanation she can give. She likes sex, and she has strong opinions on how to have it, can ask him to push her harder and take her fierce. She's not a prude, and she's familiar with her own body—she's a dancer, she has to be able to think about each muscle and the way they fit together, she has to be able to control each one, own all of her sinew as belonging to her.

And that's the thing she can't say.

She's tried it, touching herself, of course she has. When she was maybe thirteen, she'd hurt her ankle badly. It was enough she couldn't walk on it, her own weight unbearable and for once she felt right. It spent the entire day throbbing, radiating heat, and an ache that filled her belly, made her core clench up, a shudder in her flesh. Whatever had stayed her hand until then couldn't stand up to that. When she re-wrapped her ankle alone in her room that night, her fingers had pressed greedily into her skin, stretched over the angry swell of muscles that had ripped themselves to pieces because of her. It was strange to think that you could hurt yourself like that, that you could choose to do a thing and it could shred you.

Her fingers pushed at it, as if to try to hold herself together, and she felt it expand up her leg and settle between her thighs. She felt herself twinge and go slick, distant but undeniable like a bird fluttering in her hands.

Without ever deciding to do so, her other hand traveled to her pussy and touched herself over her panties, pushing in in the same way her fingers did on her ankle. Holding herself in, containing herself, keeping it together. But also: building heat, pushing the outside closer to the pulse of blood in her veins, using that pressure to make it quicken.

It hadn't taken long for her to come, just from that, rubbing herself over her plain cotton underwear with one hand and over the mildly abrasive ACE bandage on the other. It felt good, of course, but the pleasure had been dammed behind an unknowable wall. She felt the dark lake of something strange, lapping waves, and her orgasm was just a trickle to reduce the pressure. 

That night, she had the dream for the first time.

It never felt like a dream. It was always exactly as real as life, beginning with her opening her eyes like waking and blinking into the darkness of precisely her room. And she'd be there, smiling over her, teeth glinting dull white.

It'd be her, but not her, but definitely her—there was wild joy in the first glimpse of her own face, that night. A shock of recognition. Maybe this was why she was alienated, she had been lonely—her therapist had told her that everyone felt that way, but she'd always known—

And then that joy had transmuted into something darker, with the same sweet pain as she felt when she worried her bruises. The look on her own face was cruel, and when the hands reached out to touch, they pinched and scratched. She watched her own fingernails dig lines, until the pain built into heat, until the drag of keratin over skin was enough that it felt like she was being sanded away, and blood would be drawn, and she'd be breathing hard, and she'd be so _wet_ , like water gushing out of a pricked balloon.

This was a dream, she knew it even at the time, but it felt so good—so much better than earlier that day, when she touched herself all on her own.

When she had brought out the scissors and used them to draw even more blood, sketch patterns over bare flesh, leave her glistening with red, it had felt indistinguishable from the scrape of fingernails. It was all herself; she was herself; she felt present in her body and the body that was causing her to cry out with all the sharpness of its pain.

And then the big pair of scissors--heavy metal, cold, old-fashioned, sliced off the boxers she wore to bed. She looked down and studied the pussy in front of her. Addy felt like she was seeing it for the first time, our bodies ourselves. When the blades slipped between her folds, she shuddered—she slowly opened them and spread Addy apart. The night air was cool enough that it made her hotter.

Her heart was pounding and it was fear and terror and pain and recognition and happiness all mixed up so intimately she couldn't tell apart, like these scissors were going to carefully, sweetly skin her and cut all the connective tissue that let her pretend to hold herself together, plunge into her cunt and fuck her until she cried out and came to pieces and keep fucking up until it went into her heart, and the bed was soaking with blood and come, and finally, maybe, she'd remember what she'd been forgetting so long—

And she woke up, just at the moment the scissors plummeted into her, and came with a shout of terror.

Her parents hadn't come into the room. They never did anymore—her nightmares were too frequent. Addy had asked them to stop checking up on her.

Now she was grateful. She curled up like a wounded animal, tucked her nose into her knees enough that she could smell the ocean scent of her cunt. She shuddered until the nausea was swooping, unignorable—she barely made it to the bathroom before she was spilling her guts in another way.

She retched and tasted bile and felt, profoundly, like she was missing something.

The next time she touched herself, the dream happened again—years later, in a different bedroom, with her body different in both its guises.

She had only done it a couple times since, not when she was horny—she could find a person to fuck for that—but when the loneliness got to be a physical weight, when she wanted to see herself staring down at her and understand her own place in the world and know that at least, at the very least, there was a reason, even if she'll never tell Gabe.


End file.
